The Pie Garden: strawberries and rhubarb (and asparagus)

Finally, my lower garden - safely tucked in with a fence for deer, chickens, goats, and puppies - is ready for next season! In the corner, I've finished our "pie garden", filled in the block wall with good potato-tested composted soil, Mum planted it with plants rescued from abandoned corners of the the property, then I covered the whole thing with a thick layer of "beauty bark" mulch left over from the driveway circle.

Blocks in place, sod piled in the middle and brown paper grocery bags ready for deploying as weed suppressant.

Along the eastern wall of the garden, I've finished my long line of carefully leveled blocks - well over one hundred blocks, probably over two hundred... I'll count when the memory of buying and hauling and placing each one is a little less recent. To make the wall to this point level instead of having steps would take another hundred blocks, then there is still the corner where the potatoes are that has no wall... I think it looks great just the way it is! Each block carefully measured from the fence, the sod cut away, dirt dug level, compacted and filled as the block was placed...

More potatoes than dirt! At least in the first few inches...

Tim came out and dug potatoes while I spread the good rich soil he was pulling out of the bins onto a layer of brown grocery bags to keep the grass from growing (hopefully). Once all the dirt was filled in, I planted cover crops to hold the dirt from washing away, further add nitrogen and break down the soil, and to keep weeds out. 

Half way through dirt spreading!

On potatoes: the top few inches were thick with red/yellow-skinned potatoes (which were planted later... about at that level), and the bottom few inches were equally thick with the Russian purple potatoes we planted, but there was a notable lack of potatoes in the middle of our brilliant bins. I am thinking next year will go better:

1.  As plants grow, consistently "mound up" more dirt after every 6" of growth or so, then  water thoroughly. Do not wait until the plants are super overgrown, then add a ton of compost, then have it all compact down to nothing and the plants get even more overgrown, then are again stressed by being buried up to their necks... yeah, that probably could have been done better...
2. Water the plants regularly and thoroughly throughout the summer. Do not water minimally, telling the young potatoes they better toughen up if they want to survive in this harsh dry world. Do not let the potatoes get rather dead in dried out, shrunken soil then sprinkle a tiny bit of water on top that doesn't make it all the way through the dirt to the roots at the bottom but instead runs off the dry crusty surface. Do not leave for two months during the hottest, driest two months of an unusually hot and dry summer and tell anyone who offers to water the potatoes, "nah, they'll be fine!"

Following these two simple steps, I think next year will yield many more potatoes. 

Tim is happy with the potatoes.

The original instructions for potato bins.